A common gripe of SME business owners is that employees don't take responsibility. A friend, who I will call John, reminded me of this recently when he recounted a conversation he had had with his sales manager.
John told me how the annual revenue budget for his business was $3 million, but that he had discovered that the sales manager was actually working to a target of less than half that.
It transpires that John had assumed Sales Guy (the only person in the business in a sales role) would automatically take responsibility for the whole of the sales target. Sales Guy meanwhile had done a bit of back-of-the-envelope arithmetic and calculated, on the basis of his salary, the magnitude of sales he would need to generate in order to pay for himself. He set that as his goal.
Leaving aside a number of other short-comings (including of course that it would have helped if John had involved Sales Guy in setting the revenue goals in the first place) the crux of the story is this: John thought Sales Guy should have taken responsibility for the $2 million revenue figure whereas Sales Guy thought he was taking responsibility by making sure that won enough revenue to cover his costs.
Misunderstandings like this happen far more often than you would care to believe, so it's important to nail the issue of responsibility.
In an ideal world of course you would be running a business where the employees understood that they had responsibilities rather than jobs. But in practice many employees don't think this way unless you spell it out for them.
While no one wants to tightly manage employees, it is often easier to give employees responsibilities rather than to hope they take them on themselves. And that's the essence of my tip for this week: help your employees complete the statement - "I am the one person ultimately responsible for..."
Having an important responsibility, rather than just a job, can effect quite a change in an employee's attitude to work. I have literally seen people grow inches, lose a slouched back and brim with newfound confidence when they realised how important their contribution was to the business.
And just in case you have one of these, ‘responsibility' works magic with lazy employees. You know the type, they are the ones who simply assume that if they don't quite manage to get something done that someone else in the business will just do it for them. When they understand they have are ultimately responsible they will either pull their socks up, or leave. Either way, a good result.
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